


Arrangement 3 (even more post-series)

by lalaietha



Series: Ten Thousand Things [13]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Gen, Multi, Other, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-04-06
Updated: 2011-04-06
Packaged: 2017-10-17 16:44:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/178894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another assortment of ficlets happening roughly around the same time; may also be added to as appropriate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. distinction (Mai, Katara)

Neither of them had a noblewoman's hands, the soft, smooth, unlined backs and palms, tender fingertips, claw-like nails of a lady who never does anything more strenuous with them than kado, painting, brushwork, or maybe play an instrument (and even then, not for very long, lest the finger-pads roughen). Mai's mother had those hands; Zuko's mother's hands were working their way back there, after years of rough use in a peasant life.

You can't undo all of it. Mai remembered the litany, the lectures from her mother on how damage done as a young woman would be there all her life. She also remembered (fondly, or, with satisfaction) the day that her mother gave up.

Her mother-in-law had had a noble daughter's hands, once, and as much as they could, they were going back now. Not on purpose, though. Just because that was what happened when you didn't use them.

Mai's hands were shaped by the distinctive callouses that would tell anyone who saw or touched them exactly what she was, if they were experienced enough to know. The throwing-daggers wore on the tips of her thumb and first three fingers, or the skin between all five; the darts wore along-side her first finger. The longer knives ground against her palm.

She kept her nails shorter. When they got too long, they caught, tore, or bent on the knives. And beyond the toughened skin of use, she tended to ignore them - hangnails, nicks and small cuts, they all went unnoticed. She didn't care. She wasn't a doll. Her hands weren't for catching up or for looking pretty and flawless and white when she let them be seen.

Mai was Fire Lady, and no one had ever actually defeated her, hand to hand (because being tossed in the river by a ten-ton flying bovine didn't count), and her hands said that. And nobody who _mattered_ had ever complained.

And that was the differences she'd been used to: soldier's hands, warrior's hands, or clerk's hands, lady's hands. And the never-mentioned, horrific spectre of the peasant's hands, worn all around and bent up in old age from use, rough and coarse and brown through manual labour.

Katara's hands didn't fit.

They stayed soft. Her grandmother had made, and taught her to make, a lotion from kelp and rendered fat, and Mai pretended not to remember the second part, because it didn't smell and it apparently worked well. Palms and finger-tips, backs and wrists, all the way up her arm, the same smooth-soft.

But on the palms there were the grooves of water and work, the signs of wear on hands that _did things_ , always had done things, that were soaked and dried and twisted and braided, that climbed and packed and hunted and fished and paddled canoes.

She kept her fingernails short, because (she said) otherwise they just got in the way, especially if she was dealing with someone's injuries.

Katara's hands were opaque. They told their story, but you needed the key to decode it. And when she traced lines on Mai's skin with the light tips of first, middle, third finger, it was a reminder that there was a world outside of everything that seemed natural, absolute.

It had taken Mai a while to realize that, most often, when they were lying together in the languid-after, or in laziness, or in drowsing, or comfort, or really at all and sometimes just because Katara needed to touch and be touched a lot more than other people . . . . most often, Katara was tracing out the network of veins, arteries. The rivers under Mai's skin, with their pulse and teir current.

Sometimes the roughness of Mai's hands caught in her hair, but Katara never seemed to mind.


	2. care and closeness (Katara, Zuko)

Zuko didn't actually notice that his scar ached anymore.

The physicians had warned him about it when it happened, and their predictions had pretty much turned out to the letter: apparently that much scar-tissue latched onto muscle in a weird way, and pulled and stretched and was otherwise a problem, and that meant pain. For the first four years, he'd ignored it as a matter of pride and of a kind of mortification of the flesh. He just used it as a spur, as a whip to drive himself onwards.

Nowadays, he just tried to ignore it. It only really broke through when he was already worn down to his last nerve about something else, and then it was like his body misplaced all the tension he was trying to sit on to the left side of his face, where it laughed at him.

So when he was finished restraining himself from dumping all three governors who were making his face ache _this_ time in the volcano, and had sent them away with clear orders and (hopefully) a clearer sense of just how unhappy he'd be if they tried to weasel out of doing as they were told, Zuko looked with profound relief at the clear space in the rest of his schedule and retreated from the public to the private parts of the palace, and further to his own room, and threw himself face-up on the bed.

It was dramatic. He really didn't care. As it happened, he ended up being completely comfortable where he fell, and after thinking about it for a minute, Zuko elected to run through breathing exercises while prone, in the hopes of finding some kind of mood to _enjoy_ the rest of a (rare, precious, deeply needed) whole evening off.

He didn't notice he was rubbing lightly at the edges of his scar, where they pulled against healthy skin.

When the door clicked open, he knew it was either Mai, Katara, his secretary or an assassin; a voice saying, " . . . .that good, huh?" made it easy to identify Katara, and sounding like her afternoon had been a lot more productive and a lot less infuriating than his.

Zuko tried to think of a way to say, _I think I figured out why my ancestors turned into conquest-obsessed maniacs: it took them away from the bureaucrats_ that didn't tread on territory he still wasn't sure was safe to joke about, even sourly. In the end, he gave up, and just said, "Yeah. That good."

Katara came and sat on the bed, pulling her legs up and leaning on one hand. She looked a bit tired, but mostly satisfied, the kind of tired that came from a productive day. "Well, the good news is we figured out the reservoir problem," she told him.

" . . .that implies there's bad news," he pointed out, rubbing at his scarred ear.

"Fixing it is going to take about two weeks longer than your engineers were projecting," she said, which considering this morning it had looked like the whole thing might be unsalvageable barely counted as bad news.

"Royal engineers lying to make themselves look better," Zuko said, dryly. "That's never happened before."

Katara frowned. At first, he thought it was because of what he said; then he noticed her eyes were on his hand, and noticed that the left side of his face ached and that he was rubbing at it. She caught his hand and pushed it gently away, before brushing fingertips over the ridges of scartissue.

The shock was delayed, and when it came, it wasn't at the touch - it was at realizing that it didn't bother him, even a little. Quite the opposite.

She was still frowning, but he recognized this one: a working frown, and as her fingers moved and her thumb moved over the bottom arc of ruined skin, he closed his eyes. "How often does it hurt?" she asked, the warm points of pressure moving away.

"I don't know," he said, but that was only half-honest. "Pretty often. I don't really notice." Half-lie, again, and he amended, "I mostly ignore it."

The silence took on a tone that said he'd just been given the look specially reserved for Ridiculous Boys. Zuko was pretty sure he wasn't supposed to find that comforting.

Waterbending didn't just have one sound; it had many, as many as moving water could make. By now he recognized the sound of Katara calling a small amount of water to her hand, so he didn't jump when the coolness touched the edges of clear skin, where he could still feel things that subtle, all around the edges of the burn scar. "Next time, tell me," she said, leaving the you idiot unspoken.

He just rested his hand on her lower arm.


	3. after the flood (Katara, Zuko)

Zuko reflected that this was probably the only time in history a Firelord had been _grateful_ for catastrophic flooding.

Well.

Should-have-been-catastrophic flooding.

He felt vaguely guilty about that. Or, well, he felt like he _should_ have felt guilty about that, but mostly, he felt relieved, because it solved so many problems. He took a moment to assure himself that nobody had been killed, almost nobody had been hurt, the damage to the actual land (and the growing season) could either be dealt with in the next couple of weeks (especially if he could get a few other lent waterbenders, which he might, and which might be a good diplomatic opportunity) or could be made up with the surplus from somewhere else for the year, and so it wasn't _wrong_ to feel like this was actually a gift from the Universe, because the consequences had been averted.

And, if he would - no, if _they_ would still need to deal with the nobility (and what _else_ was new, in his life) . . . .

The _people_ of the Fire Nation, the ones who made the whole blasted place _work_ , now loved Katara like their very own.

Partly for what she'd done - but mostly for how she'd done it. Because the more involved she got in what she was doing, the more she forgot she wasn't dealing with Water Tribe - _Southern_ Water Tribe, specifically - and its rough, calm equilibrium, where everyone was fundamentally the same as everyone else, and self-deprecation and calm, proud competence kept the same place in each person with any worth at all.

But she was still Katara, which meant she still bossed everyone around, and was still gracious and careful and caring to everyone who passed into her sphere of awareness.

She struck, basically, the exact right balance to win them completely - by accident.

He met her at the edge of the camp. She was exhausted, and elated, and soaking wet. She'd notice the last part pretty soon: the sun was just going down. (And she'd done all this in the hours of the sun, not the moon: that was Katara for you.) But for now, she was just mud-spattered and worn out and bright-eyed, and followed by the soldiers he'd sent with her to do whatever the hell she told them to and make sure no one decided to take a shot at her back while she was busy.

Katara met his eyes and flashed a quick, triumphant grin. Zuko smiled. Then he bowed to her, very deliberately, fist below flattened hand, as a signal and an indication.

She caught on quick, and bowed back - but as to an equal, and no deeper than he.


	4. difficult to hide (Zuko, Toph)

It had been a thousand days. Two years and nearly three. Zuko counted each of them, sunrise to sunset, and then moonrise to moonset again. Each day in two parts. And he kept expecting each one to be the last. Kept revising his hope to some new number: maybe it would last a hundred days. Maybe three hundred. Three-hundred-sixty; maybe seven hundred.

Now it was a thousand, and he was still waiting for the moment he would lose one of them, or the other, or both to each other. Zuko never voiced the fear, made a sign of aversion every time he actually thought it clearly, but it was still there, lurking in the back of his head, gnawing at the pit of his heart.

That Katara would leave; that Mai would change her mind and make her go, or that she herself would decide this wasn't good enough, that it wasn't what she wanted, and make her way out into the world beyond his borders again. That Mai would suddenly find the whole thing a slight, that he would do something wrong, something that upset the balance, and she would pull away and the wall she could build behind her eyes would stand in front of him and he would no longer have a door.

That they would both figure out that everything they wanted, the other one could give them, and maybe that was the worst, because it gnawed in the places that knew, somehow, that there was little enough that an overworked (and he knew it), distracted ruler could offer to another person.

Most of him knew that if he ever confessed this, Mai would roll her eyes and remind him that she was a big girl, could make her own choices and everything, and had, all the way along; that Katara would give him an exasperated lecture on self-loathing and trust. That it would be okay.

Most of him knew that. Knew that the fear was the remnant of old things, of old ghosts and the sickness of the world-before-the-Avatar. Of what his family had been.

But just enough of him didn't believe it that he kept silent.

He should have known better; he should have known that the Universe didn't like to let him sit on things like that for too long, didn't like to let him stew, so that if he didn't deal with it himself he'd get a smack on the head from something. (He suspected his maternal great-grandfather. It gave him someone to blame, at the least.)

So Zuko _did_ smack his hand to his forehead, but honestly wasn't surprised when, on the first day of Toph's visit, she poked him in the shoulder and demanded, "Why does your body go into a _fear_ reaction every time they're laughing?" while she waved a hand in the general direction of Mai and Katara.

Zuko sighed. "If I asked you to shut up and leave it alone, what would you do?"

"Smack you," Toph replied, instantly. "Hard. You're doing it again, aren't you?" And she prodded him in the shoulder a second time. Which, he noted, hurt more now that she was all the way up to his chin.


	5. avicide (Zuko, Mai)

There was a small bird outside Zuko's window and it was going to die if it didn't shut up.

This was the thought he woke with, mostly because the bird's song manage to go right through his ear to stab at his brain, and did it over and over and over again. He meant to say, aloud, _For the love of Agni and all four elements close the window_ , because now he felt the breeze on his face, and closing the window was probably a better option than random avicide.

He blamed Piandao for the fact that he now knew words like "avicide".

But when he tried to speak, what came out was a cracked kind of whisper: his mouth was dry, his throat hurt and it felt like he was heavier than normal when he tried to raise his hand.

A lot heavier.

Zuko blinked his eyes open.

He was lying in his own bed. He was under the coverlets, propped up with pillows to a quarter-sitting, stripped to the waist (at least: he didn't move the covers to look). His bad eye seemed a little worse than normal, more film over his vision. Katara was curled up at his left side, on top of the coverlets, in her clothing with her hair still done up, and looked like she'd just lain down and passed out from sheer exhaustion.

"She'd been up for three days," said Mai's voice on his other side. With far more effort than he felt was right, he turned his head, bad eye slitting closed. Mai was sitting in a wide-backed chair, leaning on the arm, feet tucked up to the side, dressed in simple black and armed to the teeth.

"You're getting food-tasters," she informed him.


	6. not a seal (Sokka, Suki, Gran-Gran)

They didn't argue about names. Instead, they argued about whose job it was to come up with a name.

"At this point, I'm just going to call the kid 'Seal'," Sokka groused, at one point, as he sat honing the edge of his sword and Suki did the exercises that Gran-gran swore would make her back hurt less.

"We are not naming our child 'Seal'," Suki said, flatly, twisting her head around to glare at him.

"Then _you_ come up with something!" he said, flinging his arms wide. Suki just rolled her eyes.

" _I'm_ carrying the baby, _I'm_ going to have to push the baby out of my body, _you_ figure out a good name," she retorted, and turned away to change the direction for her spinal twist.

Sokka muttered and went back to his sword. And that was why Suki went into labour without anyone having any idea what the name would be. And why eventually, Gran-gran (smaller now, and frailer, but still undisputed queen of these kinds of things, who wouldn't hear anything but that she come up to Kyoshi Island from the North Pole to deliver her great-grandbaby) handed a small wrapped bundle into Sokka's slightly trembling hands and said, "What's her name, grandson?"

Sokka gaped at her, and the baby, into brand-new blue eyes, and then at Suki, who looked tiredly and unhelpfully back, and said, " . . .I don't know?"

Gran-gran looked at him, smiled, and patted his shoulder. "Call her Ataksa, my warrior," she said. "Good things tend to come to you from the sky."

Suki said, "Hn. It's pretty."

"Ataksa," Sokka tried out, softly, holding his daughter in his arms. "Hello, Ataksa." It did sound pretty. Gran-gran always knew these things.


End file.
